"I've kind of gone through all the stages of grief," said Selig, who has developed Apollo over the past nine years. Selig noted that developers were only given a month's notice about the changes, leaving them with too little time to optimize or monetize their apps to meet the sudden costs. In return, he says they assumed they would get better access to certain parts of the site, creating a longer-term concrete relationship between the company and third-party developers.īut when Reddit released its pricing on May 31, it was far higher than Selig imagined and he says he has no choice but to shut down his app - despite his loyalty to the nearly one million people he says use it every day. He says he and other developers initially thought they could offer Reddit some compensation for the volume of requests made by their apps. Selig was initially excited when Reddit first announced they would begin charging third-party applications. "It would have been around $25 million a year for something that the month earlier was free," he said.Ĭhristian Selig, the developer behind the iOS application Apollo, says Reddit's recent changes will force him to shut down his app, which he says many Reddit moderators and visually impaired users rely on. With the upcoming API change set to cost him $12,000 US (almost $16,000 Cdn) for every 50 million requests, he would suddenly have to pay Reddit over $2 million US (almost $2.7 million Cdn) each month to keep his app active for all his users. In an impassioned Reddit post, Selig outlines that his app made seven billion requests last month. ![]() Even then, he says he'd still be losing money, as most of his 50 to 70,000 paying customers use his app for $1 US a month. He says the move would force him to drop the 750,000 people who use his app monthly for free. Selig says the proposed API changes would cost him an average of $2.50 US a month per active user. So there's a large amount of users who use Apollo in that way who are losing that." "The Reddit app hasn't necessarily prioritized that. ![]() "If you're using a screen reader, you can swipe around and it'll read to you what's on screen," he said. Selig also emphasized that there are many blind or low-vision users that use Apollo, as he's made it a priority to annotate everything users see in the app. "It's sad to lose this tool that they've come to really enjoy." "There's like large swaths of moderators who use Apollo as the primary way to moderate their community and make sure the content flow is consistent and safe," Selig told CBC News. Apps forced to shut downĬhristian Selig, the Halifax-based developer behind the iOS app Apollo, which offers users an alternative viewing experience to the official Reddit app, announced in a tweet Thursday that his app would be forced to shut down at the end of this month because of the changes. Those apps are at risk of discontinuing their services if Reddit's changes go forward, as many of their developers say they cannot afford the sudden fees. Many moderation teams - unpaid volunteers that manage content in individual communities - and users with particular accessibility needs rely on third-party applications that present Reddit content in specific ways to help them moderate and navigate the site. Reddit has traditionally offered an Application Programming Interface (API) that developers can access, allowing them to create their own applications that can query the site for its information, such as a list of posts in a particular subreddit, or the content of the comments associated with a specific post.īut beginning July 1, Reddit will charge external applications for accessing the site's content - a service that has been free until now. ![]() Misinformation on Reddit has become unmanageable, Alberta moderators sayĬhanges would see developers charged to access API. ![]()
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